How Negative Emotion Could Hurt Your&nbspRankings

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

If I were to post a restaurant review right here on the SEOmoz blog with the place's name, address, phone number, and a link to its web site, what message would it send? Those of us who have been working in the SEO field for a while might once have immediately responded that citations and links are like a “votes” or “endorsements." However, what if those citations and links are negative – and what if Google can tell the difference?

Suppose I wrote a blog post about a pizza place I visited last weekend, saying that it had the worst pizza in Seattle. It was too expensive, the portion size was too small, and the staff was rude. In the absence of a star rating, does it make sense for Google to count my scathing criticism as just another local citation to boost the restaurant’s placement?

The Name of a Thing Is Not the Thing

For a modern search engine, it is critical to understand both user intent behind a query and the contextual meaning of a word. It must, for example, use contextual clues to determine whether the word “jack” refers to the device I use to change a tire, the common male name, or the slang verb meaning "to steal." Google applies stylometry (the study of language style) in the disambiguation of word and meaning – and they're getting much, much better at it.

Stylometry can also reveal a surprising amount about a person or document. The way that one uses pronouns, for example, could be used to guess whether he or she is telling the truth, prone to depression, or a psychopath with no empathy. On a much more intuitive and basic level, the words we use relay our positive or negative feelings towards a given object.

Google Knows When You’re (Un)Happy

There are dozens of potential uses of stylometry and lexical analysis to improve search quality. Just as Google uses surrounding words to identify what kind of jack I’m talking about, the search engine could also use context to determine whether the adjectives I use in reference to a product, place, or post are positive or negative. Consider the following sentiment analysis patent, filed in 2007 and issued in July of 2011:

“For example the word “small” usually indicates positive sentiment when describing a portable electronic device but can indicate negative sentiment when used to describe the size of a portion served by a restaurant.”

The patent goes on to describe a system that solves this problem by determining what the author is talking about, and then understanding whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. As with most factors in Google’s algorithm, we can only speculate on the extent to which Google applies this system. Perhaps Rand was on to something similar when he suggested authenticity and passion could be a signal that Google considers.

My sense is that search engines still lack the processing power to analyze sentiment on a large scale. Microsoft’s related patent seems to confirm that (at one point) they felt the same. However, the language of the Google patent and my own experience leads me to believe that Google has been using sentiment analysis on at least local and product results for a while now.

Implications for Local SEO

Over the last several years, the SEO community has proven that citations are like links for local businesses. I will go one step further and suggest that local citations are now analyzed for their sentiment. This allows Google to understand reviews regardless of whether or not the source includes a standard rating scale (e.g. stars). It would follow that positive citations would improve local rankings, while negative citations could harm rankings. To illustrate, consider the following search results:

Note the sentiment-phrases that Google is pulling beneath the places. The Walrus and the Carpenter is ranking quite well, especially considering how far away it is from Seattle’s center. Yes, the reviews are quite positive – but not one of them mentions “steak tartare.”

Could it be that both of these peculiarities result partially from this positive review on The Seattle Times’ Top 10 Restaurants? Is it more than coincidental that the phrase “small plates,” mentioned three times in the linked review, is also listed on the Google Maps/Places pages?

Hundreds of examples prove that Google is picking important sentiments from external websites – not just from review sites like Yelp, but also from sites that don’t necessarily focus on user-generated reviews. Further monitoring over time may be required to properly assess impact on local rankings. It seems clear to me, though, that Google would not go to the effort of determining whether a sentiment was positive or negative and then apply for a patent unless the information is being used in some way.

Getting a site listed in relevant local directories has definite value, but what really matters in improving your local rankings may be sentiment that reviewers express. Furthermore, evidence suggests Google no longer needs an explicit rating to understand how a user feels.

The Future of Links, Brands, and SEO

I doubt very much that even Google has the server power required to perform resource-intensive sentiment analysis on every link – yet. Google’s feeling decoder could easily be tweaked to understand sentiment related to links, domains, brands, articles, and more. Consider the evidence here, Google’s ever-growing powers of lexical understanding, and the potential to improve search quality; the influence of opinion and feeling on search results appears inevitable.

Building a positive relationship is often more difficult than creating negative link bait, but positive relationships are almost always more valuable. While trolling for links might be fun for some, the harsh responses may end up hurting more than feelings. Those concerned with future-proof SEO techniques would be wise to avoid references with negative context or sentiment and instead seek real and positive coverage.

About Carson-Ward —

Carson Ward has worked as a marketing manager at Clearlink and as a consultant with Distilled. In 2017 he founded a small company specializing in affiliate marketing.

Personally I don't consider sentiment analysis as something Google is directly using in the ranking pot. I write this also because I remind what Amit Sinshal in a old official Google post almost one year ago:

"Use sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes. While this proposal initially sounds promising, it turns out to be based on a misconception. [...] As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying."

That post was a consecuence of the infamous Decor My Eyes case happened last year around this period..

Amit Singhal, again in that post, was saying that Google applied an algorithmic adjustment in order to hit and downgrade the rankings of that sites, and others; and "history" seems telling us that that adjustment was a prologue to the Panda Update.

Specifically, in the case of merchants and reviews, an interesting theory presented by Danny Sullivan was that Google started to use the Review table of the Google Product Page of the merchants. Obviously Google never confirmed his theory.

Therefore, even though your idea is logical and it should be an ideal solution - and as you have wrote - the computational needs in order to apply seriously sentiment analysis and stylometry seems even tougher that the ones Google is actually using for the Panda Update. Therefore, I believe that here we are more in a classical case of correlation.

If it turns out that it doesn't affect rankings then I'm sure it'd at least affect CTRs and/or people's perceptions of a place. Using the above example, "small plates" could very much be misconstrued - although seemingly intended in a positive sense in that snippet, someone seeing "small plates" associated to a Places listing might think it means "small portions." So it might not hurt rankings per se, but I can still see it hurting traffic and therefore a hurting business...

Either way, good post, Carson. Even if it isn't the case just yet, I can see it being a powerful feature in the future that Google would very much like to use. Good work.

Thanks for your thoughts - very insightful as always. I remember the Decor My Eyes discussions, but I still feel like Google is using sentiment analysis on maps search.

I wouldn't suggest that Google is using this kind of analysis in web search yet. It's extremely complicated, and couldn't be as simple as "angry = rank lower." Politics pages, for example, are likely to draw fire from rival ideologies regardless of quality. It could be used in the future, for example to help signal pages that were in favor of a bill and pages that were against. Sentiment-related keywords have the most to gain. Perhaps the "most reliable cars" query could use the diversity of a brand, rather than filling a SERP full of made-for-search-engine articles.

When it comes to places, though, Amit's comments appear less applicable. I have a hard time imagining a case where "bad service" could be construed as a positive thing. If Google can understand such sentiments, it seems silly not to adjust accordingly.

Unfortunately, they never really told us what got adjusted after the Decor My Eyes uproar. As you say, I think it was just a manual penalty, but then they probably started to look at sentiment analysis more closely, at least for obvious problems. I don't think it's in use on everday pages or the regular algorithm, but Google might see if a site has 90%+ bad reviews and use less granular measures like that.

Seems like something that Google is still in the very early stages of testing out. It's an interesting concept, and certainly something to pay attention to. While SEO is about building links, it's also about building trust that will establish these positive sentiments.

Thanks Carson for this emotional and sentimental post! It's quite bit right fact that the Search Engines have developed much more compared to earlier times , and now they can use the stylometry way to recognize between the positive and negative modes of any words. the contextual meaning and user intention plays important role in determining the exact phrase meaning and to some extent it's been shown to everybody , But I am surprised that still it can be tweaked e.g. the Google's Local search results ! I am damn sure, in future there would be more technical development in the sentimental prediction! And thanks for the new addition of new phrase i.e. Stylometry!

For any web page Google could quite easily compare the language use statistically with a reference corpus (large sample of text) in order to determine what is 'special' or 'unique' about that particular page. In addition, they can look at common 'collocates' for a word or phrase (words that commonly occur within a designated number of words either side of the chosen word/phrase).

As a very simplified example, if they determined that "too small" occurred within a particular review 60% more than is considered average for texts of that nature (and is not followed by "but" and then an inherently positive statement within 5-10 words), they could theoretically assume that this was a negative review.

I've threatened on a number of occasions to write a post about how Google could be using Corpus Linguistics, I guess your post just gave me a little more inspiration!

Sometimes I think we expect too much from a search engine. Let's face it, Google's algo is by no means perfect, they can't even exclude spammy links successfully let alone understand emotions haha. One day, maybe yes ... but we're far from it, for time being it's just a myth!

Very interesting approach. It is in human nature to click on negative or controversial links first, may be the amount of CTR that is a part of Google ranking algorithm. Google tends to rank content with negative sentiment over anything else. This is the reason that those negative reviews stick around.

"I ask a very simple question the Google rep is out of Switzerland, and it appears the other response's are clearly just out right making irrelevant statements."

Let me make it more relevant for you as a Google employee based in the United States: I would definitely avoid Better Placement. The first thing I see when I visit betterplacement.info are the words "Guaranteed First Page Placement on Google." That's a big warning sign immediately on visiting betterplacement.info. The reason that it concerns me that Better Placement put those words (in an image) on betterplacement.info is because in our official documentation on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291 we mention "Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google."

Based on a quick assessment, I personally would choose not do business with Better Placement. Do you have any other questions about Better Placement or betterplacement.info, bruben25? Or any other SEO firms based in Toledo? By the way bruben25, I'm not sure we got a 100% clear answer as to whether you were affiliated with Better Placement or betterplacement.info in some way?

[...]

I think that gets the idea across. No offense, but my advice remains to avoid Better Placement.

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I bet not everything Google crawls is always analyzed for sentiment. That would be pretty computationally expensive. I do feel that if the web spam team or algo's get clued in on possible bad/manipulative behavior, they can do extensive sentiment analysis on a specific company or website, to get a more complete view on things.

And interesting to combine this with Author Rank, location and relevance. How much clout does the positive or negative commenter has? Would negative sentiment from an Author like Matt Cutts count just as much as negative sentiment from a net granny? Would sentiment from people local to you count more than sentiment from people not even in your service area? Is the sentiment author an authority on the main topics?

Common sense tells me Author Rank, relevance and location should all play a role in a perfect world.

Really enjoyed this! I imagine that sentiment analysis would play into the arena of social more than traditional link building, also the permanency of interactions on the internet also puts an interesting spin on things, especially you think about those people that work in the sphere of online relationship management, where negative posts are often made and then then the company in question works hard to win the customer around (and often are able to) - do, or should these negative comments still count against a business when that business has done everything possible to sort everything out.

Great post! However, isn't it possible that a lot of what we assume of Google is completely false? After all, no one except Google engineers themselves ACTUALLY know how it works. I do not doubt that Google has some powerful algorithms going on behind the scenes but I fail to believe they have truly achieved this level of artificial intelligence yet. Even if they have achieved some semblance of this functionality, chances are they would spend years refining the process and testing it long before it is ever used to actually rank and influence search results.

Interesting post and nice comments by Gianluca. Eventhough Google does not give lot of importance now for "negative sentiment" in ranking, this is definitely going to be inevitable in the future. Thanks for the post Carson!

I raised a very similar topic on SEO Chat here - http://forums.seochat.com/jackets-only-89/language-positivity-ranking-algorithm-455245.html - the thread didn't get as much traction as I thought. Some interesting points were discussed - the main one for me was what if there was a particularly ad event that a lot of people talked of in a negative light, this would potentially not rank well despite the fact that there was a lot of discussion on it.

Now we could get into the finer points of how algorithms work and how to weight various parameters effectively but thats a little off topic.

I think it is very important to under stand the language being used, not to just metrically interpret text. I am sure modern search engine algorithms do a good amount of this ny way, I would be interested to see and here reports on this in practice.

I'm surprised how concerned people seem about the potential to game sentiment. Using what you suggest in combination with classical spam analysis creates the exact same process by which link spam is controlled.

I remember seeing a small vendor who was complaining about a larger company stealing her product design ideas. The resulting crtiticism of the company (with more followed links) created a large number of links directly to the product page, causing them to rank first for some of the keywords. Perhaps some day the search engine will understand that those links should not have counted.

Interesting read. Definately sentiment is becoming important But real problem will emerge when people start misusing negative feedback (to down rank others) due to its importantance as a ranking factor. I think, that is why google is moving forward carefully in this regard.

It could happen (and people will try) but I'd counter that with negative linking. Google uses links to count as votes -- and some are negative votes. People are always going to try to do this with any system. But as Yelp does, some of those "false" reviews are easy to spot. So I'm with you, Google will go about this carefully and rather silently until they are sure it works well.

And as for the negativity ... already there IMHO. I hate that the internet is that negative but alas, human nature.

Very interesting point of view. But as you said we can only speculate. Personally I don't think it is not that important as a ranking factor, considering factors like "amount of reviews" "links" and especially onpage. But I do agree on the fact that semantic factors are going to play a role in SEO.

I was looking for a Korean cafe on Google and I found one that had the word 'Korean' in the 'at a glance' section (what carson called sentiment-phrases). I went to the place and there was nothing particularly Korean about it except that it was owned by Koreans and sold a large variety of teas.

I went back and read the reviews. Most of them used the word Korean only to describe how pricey the coffee and tea were.

"Everything is a little pricey, just like your typical Korean cafe."

"Drinks are pricey but so it is in every korean cafe."

It was a good lesson in trusting algorithmic shortcuts. But as the article says, Google will get better at it so it's definitely something to take into account.

Good post and good area to investigate, I have been integrating social signals into my SERP analysis for a while via using various monitoring tools. I think in the near future if customers are happy or sad it will be a key factor. The only thing to worry about is spammers and people trying to rip this off, I remember seeing it with local citations how you could integrate forum data it was very easy for spammers to mess with and Google gave 100s of local ratings when they were not even related.

How about constructive critisism, if your giving suggestions, saying someones sites doesn't look nice because it's to cluttered by ads. I'd have to agree with Matt, its the activity that counts not the what the comment means, in terms of being supportive or negative.

I'm not actually talking about comments at all. I suspect Google would completely ignore them in context.

In addition to what I wrote in the post, another useful take-away for local SEO would be to work with reviewers to help them understand the impact they might be having. Consider the case presented in the blog. The reviewer was actually not complaining about the plates being small, but he contributed to the sentiment being added beneath the places page.

I've been thinking about this since I heard Rand mention in a recent WBF. Sounds like there's no clear evidence still as to whether or not it matters if the review is positive or negative - but that it is most likely leaning in that direction. (of rewarding positive reviews.) However this is a good reminder, that we need to be sharing direct links to review sites and 'asking' customers to drop us a line. One thing we know for now, more is better.

I remember a post about one or two years ago which actually told the opposite story. There was this business which received dozens of hate and negative reviews from customers who got duped and ripped off by them. All the negative feedback on other websites, reffering to the business website provided him a top ranking position for the keywords he actually wanted.

In a responds to all the publicity he received, the owner said he couldn't be happier with the people who posted negative stuff about him. It actually boosted his business and sales, even in SEO!

So i'm not really sure that what you are saying here actually works. It does sound like the logic you would expect from Google. But in reality, i doubt it...

This has been beaten to death. Until such time as Google, et al can 'get' sracasm, sentiment analysis is not even worth talking about. Regurgitating crap that has been disproven many times over just makes this blog look bad guys.